Paul Muldoon: New Yorker Poetry Editor

The New York Times reports that the New Yorker magazine has appointed Irish poet Paul Muldoon as its poetry editor. The New Yorker is an important magazine for poets, printing work by established and new writers and presenting it to an exacting and influential audience. Muldoon aims to be “absolutely open to the poem that one simply did not expect to have made its way into the world and somehow suddenly falls on one’s desk”. The selection procedure can not have been as easy as David Remnick makes it sound:

“It’s not just a matter of picking the best poet you can think of,” said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker. “It’s also somebody who would know how to be in touch with an enormous range of poets, and that narrows it down a little bit more. And also somebody who’s not in Alaska.”

Mr. Remnick added that the selection of Mr. Muldoon, who had his first poem published when he was just 16, did not represent “some sort of radical aesthetic or theoretical shift.”

He added, “It’s not as if we went from a structuralist to a post-structuralist or a Beat to a conservative.”